The report, which examined conditions at Stafford Hospital in Staffordshire over a 50-month period between 2005 and 2009, cites example after example of horrific treatment: patients left unbathed and lying in their own urine and excrement; patients left so thirsty that they drank water from vases; patients denied medication, pain relief and food by callous and overworked staff members; patients who contracted infections due to filthy conditions; and patients sent home to die after being given the wrong diagnoses.

Dr Mattu clearly remembers the day in December 1999 when a 35-year-old man who was vomiting blood died on an acute medical ward. Dr Mattu says the bay was overcrowded so that medical staff were unable to move him nearer life-saving equipment. He believes the man’s death could have been avoided. -Helen Weathers

BRITONS are proud of the National Health Service, but their affections are being sorely tested. Last July a coroner ruled that a man had died of thirst in St George’s Tooting, a big London hospital. A television documentary exposed systematic cruelty in a care home contracted by the NHS, leading to convictions. Later this month Robert Francis, a barrister, will conclude a report into malpractice and neglect at a Staffordshire hospital between 2005 and 2009. Up to 1,200 patients are thought to have died unnecessarily there.

A senior NHS official has admitted that funding shortages mean hip and knee replacements will have to be rationed according to pain levels in some parts of the country.

Three clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in the West Midlands have proposed reducing the number of people who qualify for hip replacements by 12%, and knee replacements by 19%. To qualify under the proposed rules, patients would need to have such severe levels of pain that they could not sleep or carry out daily tasks.

Three damning reports last night laid bare the crisis in NHS hospitals, maternity units and GP surgeries. One investigation revealed that a quarter of new mothers were abandoned by their midwives during labour, with some left to give birth on the floor or in corridors. The second found that mistakes deemed so serious they should never happen are being made in hospitals five times a week. And the third survey said thousands of patients have all but given up trying to secure appointments with their family doctor.

LONDON — Shockingly bad care and inhumane treatment at a hospital in the Midlands led to hundreds of unnecessary deaths and stripped countless patients of their dignity and self-respect, according to a scathing report published on Wednesday.

"Elderly and vulnerable patients were left unwashed, unfed and without fluids. They were deprived of dignity and respect. Some patients had to relieve themselves in their beds when they were offered no help to get to the bathroom," said Francis. He said some patients were left in excrement-stained sheets and some who could not eat or drink without help did not receive it. Medicines were prescribed but not given. Many will find it difficult to believe that all this could occur in an NHS hospital," he said.

A Department of Health source said Mr Hunt wants to make sure NHS organisations value care as much as they value the quality of treatment. In particular he wants lessons to be learned from the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust scandal, where 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because of appalling care.

Families of patients who were mistreated at the hospital said that they hoped the report would prevent a repeat of what happened to them. “We don’t want other people suffering like our family did,” Christine Dalziel, whose 64-year-old husband, George, died after a bowel cancer operation at Stafford in 2007, told reporters. Though the operation was successful, Mr. Dalziel went for days without pain medication after his epidural was dislodged, she said, and was left in bed in soiled sheets and lost nearly 60 pounds before dying in the hospital. “His bones were sticking out of his back,” she said.

Take five year cancer survival rates. Numerous studies have shown Britain falling well below the European average, with Britain starting to be overtaken or rivalled by countries such as Slovenia and even Poland. As an editorial in the Lancet Oncology said in September 2007: "Overall survival for all cancers combined in the UK as a whole is not only below the European average, it is also noticeably similar to some Eastern European Countries that spend less than one third of the UK’s per capita healthcare budget. "The reports show survival for gastric, colorectal, lung, breast, ovarian and prostate cancer in England is lower than the European average, and in some cases among the lowest in Europe".

The reports last week of Kane Gorny’s final hours beggared belief. The 22-year-old had been admitted to one of the UK’s top teaching hospitals for hip replacement surgery, but within three days he’d died of thirst, after medical staff ignored both his pleas for water and the symptoms of dehydration that experts say are ‘easy to recognise’. When Kane, in desperation, rang 999 on his mobile, a policeman who responded to his call witnessed him shouting repeatedly to the nursing staff: ‘Can I have some water?’

The consequences of failing to meet these challenges are clear. The unnecessary pain, indignity and distress suffered by older patients in NHS facilities have been hauntingly documented by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman and the inquiry into care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. The independent public inquiry, chaired by Robert Francis QC, found that for many the most basic elements of healthcare were neglected and staff displayed ‘insufficient care for patients’ dignity with some left in degrading conditions and others inadequately dressed’. This inadequacy resulted in ‘horrific experiences that will haunt them and their loved ones for the rest of their lives’.

Even as you read this, in almost every hospital in the country, there will be elderly, vulnerable people left for hours and sometimes days on trolleys. Each year, thousands of British people - the young, the old, the rich, the poor - die unnecessarily from lack of diagnosis, lack of treatment and lack of drugs. They die and suffer unnecessarily for different reasons, but there is just one root cause: the blind faith the Government has in the ideology of the National Health Service, and our unwillingness to accept not just that it doesn't work, but that it can never work. Bernard Kouchner, the health minister of France, widely thought of as having the best health system in the world, recognised this last week when he condemned the NHS as 'medieval' and 'intolerable'.

London, Oct 15: Falling numbers of state dentists in England has led to some people taking extreme measures, including extracting their own teeth, according to a new study released on Monday. Others have used super glue to stick crowns back on, rather than stumping up for private treatment, said the study. One person spoke of carrying out 14 separate extractions on himself with pliers.

She painted a picture of nurses who treated her husband with “coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt” – echoing the words of the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt last week. Ms Clwyd said she had had “nightmares” about what happened, adding: “I really do feel he died from people who didn’t care.”... “Nobody, nobody should have to die in conditions like I saw my husband die in,” she said during a radio interview... “He didn’t have any clothes over him. He was half-covered by two very thin, inadequate sheets, his feet were sticking out of the bed at an angle," she told BBC Radio 4's World at One. “It was extremely cold and I tried to cover him with a towel. He was very distressed, totally aware of his situation. Although unable to speak because of the oxygen mask he let us know he was cold and that he wanted to come home.”